I read a paperback called “First Offense” by Nancy Taylor Rosenberg. I put “Jackie O” on hold, I just felt more like a murder mystery. My plan is to spend the day in the shop, so you get a book report if nothing else today. “First Offense” was published (Penquin NYNY) in 1995 and has all the trademarks of a chick flick. There must be an institute somewhere that trains authors to clone these stories.
Mind you, the plot was excellent and moves along Capote-style. No wasted sentences. What is wasted is time, the book is at least three times longer than needed because the author included all the obligatory extras except homosexuality. Page after page of single mother (with disturbed teenager) seeing a new man. Do we really need to know the brat is overweight and pees the bed? Is it all that important she used to have a ponytail? “First Nonsense”.
Worst feature? The number of characters. I cataloged 14 and there were around half again as many mentioned once or twice. It was like reading a Russian history book. Most characters were a little smarmy even by Tom Clancey standards. Billionaire district attorney whose mother hates him. Fifty-year-old tough cop who thinks he can still beat up any young’un on the force. Chinese kid running a drug lab.What got me most was the author’s typically over-sympathetic view of the criminal justice system. How tough the cops have it, yeah, yeah. How the rules of evidence make it hard to get convictions. This was not the theme of the book, but it reveals how hard-boiled public attitude has become toward the outrageous treatment of innocent people caught up in the process. I mean, if you weren’t up to something, the police wouldn’t have arrested you, right? The police would never arrest you just for show, would they?
I am all for putting criminals in jail, but not for putting accused people in jail – it has become cruel and unusual. I am against plea bargaining and turning accomplices against each other, a form of blackmail if you ask me. I am against ridiculously high bail which discriminates against the poor. I am against police interrogation because the police abuse the system to extract false confessions just too repeatedly. I am against police using Motor Vehicle information to snoop (because the information was not originally given for that purpose and is therefore unsuitable for any other – it is not like they read you your rights when you get a license, you might think twice).
And so on, you see there is a whole middle layer of “law enforcement” that needs a drastic cleanup. The horrible daily drama of what happens to people who are arbitrarily arrested, questioned or detained. Not the guilty ones, but the ones who should have been left alone in the first place. There is not enough of a difference between the way ordinary people are arrested compared to criminals caught red-handed. This book, and so many others, treats this outrage as just the way things are. They whistle differently when their own kid gets arrested but by then it is too late.
To sum up, in the book the kid was innocent of all the crimes he was originally charged with. However, in the process he was strip-searched, humiliated, spent a week in a filthy holding cell, insulted in a courtroom, had his parents dragged in, charged with crimes that were caused by his reaction to an unfair system, placed on probation, beaten up, handcuffed, and repeatedly held at gunpoint by the police. Yet he was innocent. Yet this was not even a story about him. Forgive me if I think the police should not be allowed to even touch anybody who comes along quietly. I have discussed my recommendations and remedies elsewhere.
This book, and many others, take the tone that this police roughing up somehow “normal” treatment, that it is okay for the system to do this to the innocent. Softens them up, I hear. It seems we have forgotten that the police do not have the right to punish anyone, that is not their job. In the end, the kid never even got an apology, only that “the people (sic) are prepared to dismiss counts one through three”. The remorse! This is justice? In some eye’s, apparently so. Gotta make money somehow.
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